The advent of formation of plastic materials such as plastic sheets, films and nonwoven webs by extrusion processes such as, for example, slot film extrusion, blown bubble film extrusion, meltblowing of nonwoven webs and spinbonding of nonwoven webs allowed a wide variety of products to be manufactured so inexpensively that they could be viewed as disposable, as opposed to reusable. Representatives of such disposable products include disposable diapers, disposable tissues and disposable wipes, for example, disposable wet wipes.
A problem which has confronted those in the art is the formation of a wipe which may be easily dispensed by the consumer. A particularly troublesome area has been the dispensation of disposable wet wipes which are designed to be utilized by a mother in maintaining proper infant hygiene. Wipes of this sort should preferably be easily and readily dispensable because, in many situations where need for wipe dispensation occurs, the mother or other individual who is caring for the infant is holding or otherwise attempting to control the infant. As those who have encountered such a situation will rapidly admit, the situation demands the utmost patience on the part of the mother. In such a situation, the necessity of having to deal with wipes that will not immediately and easily dispense in one-at-a-time fashion can be quite frustrating. Unfortunately, the very nature of a wet wipe makes the wipe difficult to dispense in one-at-a-time fashion.
The difficulty in one-at-a-time dispensation of wet wipes arises from the fact that the wipes tend to cling to each other within their dispenser. This problem is very apparent in the present infant hygiene wet wipe dispensing systems where the wipes are stacked, in planar form, one on top of each other within a container that is designed to retain the liquid saturated wipes. Upon opening of the container, the user is confronted with a stack of generally coinciding wipes which characteristically cling to each other due to the presence of the liquid retained within the stack of wipes. In such a situation, the user usually has to carefully peel the top wipe off of the stack starting at the edge. This is a tedious and thus undesirable operation. Those in the art have attempted to overcome this problem by providing a wipe dispensing system where the individual wipes are connected along a serrated edge. In this system, dispensation involves withdrawing approximately a wipe and a half from the container and applying a jerking motion to the leading wipe to disconnect the leading wipe from the remainder of the wipes which, with the exception of the leading portion of the now leading wipe, remain within the container. Unfortunately, the jerking motion does not always result in a parting of the serrations interconnecting the wipes, and thus user time and aggravation are still present.
Yet another problem which is associated with the prior wet wipes is that, over time, the liquid which has been applied to the wipes tends, under the influence of gravity, to seep down to the bottom of the container. Thus, the topmost or leading wipe is usually the dryest of all of the wipes to be dispensed. This, of course, is quite unsatisfactory.